Princess McQuillan

Name: Princess McQuillan Dasinger

Gender: Female

Age: 18

Grade: Senior

School: George Hunter High School

Hobbies and Interests: Writing and editing, reading, aesthetics and tropes of romanticism, whittling, photography, gossip, acting and stagecraft, machinery and repair.

Appearance: Princess is 5’4”, with light skin with warm olive undertones due to some mixed heritage. She is generally pale and does not tan readily but with enough exposure tends to have a decent one. She typically weighs between 130 and 140 lb, with a generally rectangular figure with only slight bust and modestly brawny calves and upper arms.

She has a heart-shape face with a sharp chin. She has regular hormonal acne breakouts that cluster against her hairline but can usually hide them well enough. She has naturally strong cheekbones, along with modest dimples when she smiles. Her eyes are a dull blue whose color is difficult to discern unless close, her eyebrows are naturally bushy. The bridge of her nose is short and flat. Her shoulder length hair falls in a messy texture, naturally a pale blonde verging on white, and she has tried to dye it a metallic pink but the dye job is unmaintained and thus unevenly distributed into streaks that bleed back into the original color closer to her scalp.

Princess is not explicitly interested in fashion, but a discerning social eye and general aesthetic tastes for the tastefully dramatic lead her to having a penchant for thrifty wardrobe assembling. She’s limited by budget but gets away with rotating versatile pieces and relying on accessories to help budget fabrics pop. She rather likes hats, scarves, and sunglasses, in neutral or modest, warm tones. She often spends more on accessories than her actual clothes. She has only drugstore makeup, while knowledgeable in basic applique, she relies more on her youth and health to avoid extra expenditures and her skincare routines are thoroughly basic.

She has a naturally nasal and pitchy voice, and she often speaks purposely lowly in her register to not project the natural flimsiness of her speaking voice, but when surprised or flustered the more natural affectation comes through. She has good enunciation.

On the day of the abduction Princess wore a fitted synthetic wool turtleneck in a snowy white, tucked at the waist into a forest green pleated skirt that reached down her calves. She wore black stockings and black felt ankle-cut boots with inch heels. She wore a simple golden-chain necklace. She wore a wine red beret, with black square-frame sunglasses perched on top. She opted for cherry red lipstick and otherwise modest applique to even her skin tone.

Biography: Princess was born to Jacelyn McQuillan and Caleb Cortez Dasinger. Jacelyn was 21, working as a copywriter; Caleb was 25 and freshly returned from overseas deployment. Princess was conceived on Jacelyn’s 23rd birthday, but shortly after the relationship fell apart when Caleb got cold feet and ran out on his fiance, and he left before learning Jacelyn was pregnant. Jacelyn was unable to track down or correspond with Caleb for years, his family refusing to aid her with reconnecting with him. Princess was born October 7.

As a single mother Jacelyn made too much to qualify for most poverty assistance, so she instead moved back into her widowed mother’s home. Donna McQuillan helped out with Princess from a young age, and many of Princess’ early memories are of a busy household with the two elder women of her family. Princess as a toddler was prone to tantrums due to being easily frustrated but otherwise agreeable and personable. The suburb of Chattanooga they lived in was quiet, and there were few children. Princess spent most of her time indoors with toys her mother could only afford to foist on her during special occasions, and she internalized good homemaking practices by following her grandmother around.

Princess attended a state-subsidized preschool. As she learned to read and write she bonded with her mother some over curiosity in her writing profession. Jacelyn tended to work long hours to make extra and thus arrived home exhausted regularly, but Princess made a habit of trying to stay up so she could bother her mother. Princess wrote crude stories for Jacelyn and Jacelyn was in turn thrilled to read Princess age-appropriate books and offer writing advice, as much as Princess could actually understand at her grade level. Princess had a particular love for fairy tales and from a young age, her creative propensities were for rich and supernatural worlds.

Princess was mostly average in her first years of school, her imagination was fairly internally-angled and she sometimes had difficulty translating her thoughts into assignments. When Princess made her first friend she was quick to invite the girl to her home for a playdate- when they went to school the day following that girl teased her for having a dingy and boring home and made bad comments about her grandmother. A furiously crying Princess eventually shoved the offender, and a teacher observing that recess apprehended her and sent her home for the day with summons for parent-teacher conference. Donna reassured Princess that day, and urged the younger girl to be proud of her humble lifestyle. Jacelyn for her part refused to take the school’s warnings to heart and didn’t discipline Princess further. Princess herself was inclined to nurse the wound to her pride, she made a few more friends in subsequent grades but refused to engage with them much outside of school.

Princess got her first taste of theater in the second grade as part of a class production for parents. The roles were decided by lottery and Princess ended up with a lead role, and her reluctance quickly ended when she learned she’d be able to help come up with the script. She showed a flare for the dramatic inspired by her personally darker reading into tales like Rapunzel, introducing a kidnapping of her character as part of the tale’s conflict. Her acting on stage included passionate displays, fake crying and screaming, and other children’s parents watching the production came up to her after the production to praise her. She noted others of her peers did not put up the same sort of emotional delivery that she did and was thus heartened, much as she sometimes felt isolated for her relative quietness in class she began to feel pride in the feeling of being different.

Princess at this age wished to hike the outdoors of Chattanooga often, and would be accompanied by her grandmother after school to local parks like Heritage. Princess developed a fondness for the beauty of the wilderness, observing an air of mystery and power that was intellectually stimulating, that made her feel cool by appealing to her dramatic sensibilities. During these trips Donna taught Princess one of her most cherished hobbies, whittling. Princess didn’t have the best hand-eye coordination and often felt embarrassed in PE classes, so whittling was unknown territory to her as a more dexterous art. She was clumsy, but with her grandmother’s gentle patience she got through her own frustrations. Within a year she was capable of producing knick-knacks from kindling, and she had little totems and the like in her room. She kept the hobby to herself, sure her peers in school would find it unseemly.

Halfway through Princess’ fifth grade year, Donna began to ail. Soon she was mostly confined to the home, as she refused to spend time in a hospital or elderly care home. The family was able to afford a part-time nurse on Medicare, but Jacelyn and especially Princess often helped out. Princess stayed at her grandma’s side as much as she could, but was despaired witnessing the slow sapping of her grandmother’s vitality, the loss of her former sharpness and the pain she was clearly in. Princess was motivated to stay strong and smile for her grandma’s sake, but her low mood led to clear consequences like her grades slipping and her sleep suffering. Donna passed in the summer of 2010, just before Princess entered the sixth grade.

The family was forced to move- Donna had not finished paying the mortgage on the home and her savings had been depleted by the time she’d died. They moved to a trailer park in the rural exurbs north of where Princess would eventually attend high school. The move only further depressed young Princess, as she’d developed a strong attachment to the home of her childhood.

Many things had changed for her too quickly, and on top of all of that she was beginning to experience the moodiness and wanderlust of early puberty. She at least attended the same school but she felt alone there too, withdrawing into herself and slowly being frozen out by her old friends for her surly silences. She focused more heavily on her writing to express herself, and took a strong interest in poetry. Her work from this era was proto-gothic, existentialist and raw with her usual refined aesthetic stripped away by her mourning grief. She poured out her thoughts onto paper in work rather mature and developed for her age, and one of her most touched upon themes in so many words was that she’d grown up too fast.

Her experience was not helped by her mother. In her own coping with the passing of her beloved mother Jacelyn decided to throw herself into the dating world- that she’d shunned for years for Princess’ sake- to try and hang onto her youth. Jacelyn began to use alcohol more liberally as a social lubricant to help her relax. She proved fairly popular, but her emotional vulnerability made her relationships more volatile. She had self-worth enough to end relationships that had red flags, of which there would be several, but Jacelyn moved between men every few months seemingly. Princess almost universally distrusted the strange men in her home no matter how kind or friendly they were to her and was standoffish with them. Jacelyn on her end was resentful that her time was stolen by a boring job and her daughter, and that Princess never gave her man of the month a chance. The rift between the two deepened as time passed, and neither could quite muster up the courage and maturity to try and communicate openly, dialogue between them often frigid and passive-aggressive.

Princess entered middle school with a sudden burst of energy, a vow to make new friends and be more outgoing. By now she was consciously insecure of her lot in life, of her family’s lack of money, her trashy living conditions, she was embarrassed by her mother, and she felt these things did not reflect her best self as she believed was shown through her artistic passion.

In the pursuit of what she felt was decent society Princess trusted herself to have a natural taste that others would appreciate- with no regular access to a computer in her household she was generally isolated from trends of the time. Her mother could only teach her spartan makeup arts and Princess was mindful of the home’s limited budget, so she ultimately focused on using her self-conscious nature to whip her personality into a pleasant and interesting one. Attentiveness in conversations became a quick wit, but she learned to also be able to hold her tongue as needed. Using the gravitas of well-spoken charm and some amount of natural cuteness she won friends in middle school and was from this age on generally well-liked and adjunct to popularity. She always kept details of her home life under wraps, keeping people at arms length as necessary. And ultimately she would quickly find it was difficult to truly get intimate with people anyways. She found most people without artistic sense vapid, and she found people who she could flow with in stimulating conversation worthy of jealousy as much as respect- she would be threatened in her realm of being a budding genius with deep, adult insights into the world. But she kept all her many misgivings to herself, and was never for want of a diversity of friends, much as she sometimes had to grit her teeth to get through time spent with them.

Her penchant for playing roles naturally drew her back to theater, this time in the form of drama class and club as offered by her middle school. In parts desire to not draw too much attention to herself and parts seething fear of her works being judged she avoided submitting scripts, much as she felt her ideas infinitely more inspired than her peers’. As a thespian she expanded her bounds within the two years she was in middle school, developing a versatility to do anything from classic Shakespeare to comedic improv, though she of course preferred roles with more passion and intellectual framing. In the interest of their common work she would form her closest ties to fellow theater kids and she would also extend her friendliness to stage crew, becoming something of a central figure in the school’s drama kids scene. It rarely mattered to her how few interests were shared, so long as they were not so incompetent as to be outright impossible to talk to she could feign interest until they would regard her with fondness, as someone to at least respect, not to bully or otherwise look down on.

Princess still ultimately preferred time on her own, finding by now that she felt more generally introverted. Time outside of school and dates with friends was sometimes spent rambling by herself in the parks and wilderness areas she’d once shared with her grandmother- she did not care much for returning home to remind herself of the poverty of the trailer park, to awkwardly share a home with whoever her mother was then dating. She had few friends in the trailer park as well, feeling them universally beneath her. She could lose herself in hours long whittling work, cutting down loose branches into knick-knacks she’d take home or offer as spur-of-the-moment gifts at school, or meditating on stanzas in new poetry as she wandered.

She also haunted the local library and tried to deepen her literary knowledge. She maintained her childhood love of fairy tales but began to develop a stronger interest in grander efforts at characterization. She’d go through genres like YA, historical fiction, sci-fi and find them all enjoyable at least as study to further her own art. Her mainstay however, ultimately became things with the bend of romanticism, she was attracted to the larger-than-life drama, the focus on individualism and self-betterment that she felt reflected herself, and the depth of the language and prose. She digested work of historical authors like Austen, the Bronte sisters, Dickinson, and Woolf. Emerson and Thoreau’s philosophies further assured her that her innate connection to nature had purpose and meaning. She remains broadly read, using her lonely hours well, but the vivacity of her narrative voice takes the most cues from romanticism and even gothic aesthetic.

When Princess graduated into GHHS she was already well established, having through her connections in theater and her general projections of non-threatening intellectualism and agreeableness built a solid social circle with inroads into a multitude of the loosely defined cliques of her Freshman year. Princess enjoyed the rights to decent popularity and the benefits, including access to party invites as her year ended up being a very socially active one with many colorful characters. She accepted these invites out of curiosity but her suspicions that she would be unentertained proved largely correct, she disliked loud music and the overabundance of pubescent sexuality, the scene generally struck her as more crass than tantalizing. She’d stop going to parties save the occasional ‘cannot miss’ mixer by her Sophomore year, excusing herself by citing a preference for intimate settings that typically tided over the curious.

One tendency of the class of 2018 was it’s abundance of petty drama from Freshman year onward, and Princess initially flexed her connections for the occasional whisper of innocent gossip. She believed she’d find the process crude in how it caricatured otherwise rich personas and reduced them to hearsay, and only allowed herself to engage in the process initially under the pretense that she’d keep careful awareness of her own social standing and nip danger in the bud as it occurred.

However she quickly found herself enjoying deeper insights into her peers, sensationalized as they were, and it in a way struck her as her favorite romances and dramas playing out in reality. She jumped some mental hoops to justify to herself becoming a gossip, assuring herself that her approach was genteel, and she slowly forged herself into the sort of girl who could innocently leak secrets in long form, betraying other’s trust without ever being for a second suspected due to her prudence and caution giving her the gift of timeliness. She only rarely allows herself to be so mean spirited, but it is a rush whenever she is, giving her a feeling of power over another.

In Sophmore year she also started tackling her image in the physical sense. Makeup remained unattractive to her broadly as she felt it unnatural, but she was interested enough in wardrobe updating, as she’d relied since on plain and basic clothes along with a smattering of hand-me downs spun as fashionably retro.

In the interest of self-reliance she started job hunting, as despite her young age even a little extra spending money from few working hours appealed to her. She was diligent in sending out resumes and interviewing, and after a month’s search she landed a hostess job in Blue House, an eatery already somewhat famous among her peers. The job was mostly a bore and a drag, requiring her to exaggerate her geniality even more and winning her attention from men that discomforted her. However she was infatuated enough with the money that she’d increase her hours when she turned 16, and she works heavier schedules in summers.

In her Junior year a few of Princesses’ friends would invite her to try out other clubs, as she’d been fairly static her first few years of high school. She made efforts in good faith to try out some new clubs in her free time, but the one that would end up sticking was her stint in the photography club. She found she appreciated the possibilities of creative expression despite the limitations of the medium, and she was taken by the school providing equipment for her to practice with and the opportunity to show off her artistry in another angle. Her whittling remained a private practice and her writing was increasingly stymied by a sense of perfectionism that made her afraid to show artistic weakness despite her long presence in writing club. As a thespian she was purely focused on excellence. In writing club she became more of an editor and beta reader, hoarding her works to herself and stormily brooding in long periods of writer’s block; in photography club she felt less performance pressure and could relax enough to flourish socially by her standards.

Several months into her Junior year Princess was asked by a Mr. Peter Redder, who had been a former friend and colleague of her grandmother, to help with a garage project. Princess graciously accepted, fond as she was of him as he’d been familiar to her when younger, though she was initially reluctant. Princess helped him construct a CNC lathe and he demonstrated how it could automatically form something crudely similar to what she regularly whittled. While part of her aesthetic sensibility found it soberingly fake she also couldn’t help but be intrigued: she’d loved the energy and creative satisfaction that came with using hand and power tools as an extension of her crafting with whittling. He concluded their session by openly admitting he’d been looking for someone young to teach skills to as he had no children. She played coy for a few more months, coming to terms with the new mode of expression and trying to reconcile her stubborn belief that machines were too cold and dead to be true art. She formed a positive dialogue with Mr. Redder, eventually she encouraged him to take up teaching and he found a position in a local technical school.

Around that time, in the summer before her Senior year would begin, her father finally rediscovered her. He reconnected with Princess and Jacelyn via Facebook, once the two finally splurged on phones and data plans and thus had reasons to use social media regularly. Princess and Jacelyn had never spoken much of him, so his sudden presence in her life was a shock to Princess, who couldn’t quite sort out her feelings towards him. She was conflicted over his blatant negligence, but supposed she could appreciate his efforts to try and rekindle his being in her life even if only this weakly.

He had a full family of his own now, and Princess tried to befriend some of her half-siblings. She didn’t think highly of his family in general, believing them to be poor in taste and sense, on top of being actually no higher in economic status than herself. In general her father’s returning into her life left Princess frustrated, it seemed to only air out old wounds and not heal them properly. She found herself feeling her relation to him only further dragged down her stock, but she put a strong aesthetic value on trying to honor her roots, so she had no personal choice but to try to keep entertaining what she considered a sad relationship.

Her Senior year, otherwise, was eventful. Princess maintained average track in her prior years of high school, and saw for herself self-improvement in the form of improving her art as opposed to her academics. She kept a full AP track in English classes however, and her teachers encouraged her to apply to colleges as her developed mind could go far despite her relative weakness in more STEM tracks. She eventually decided she would take a full time job after graduating and would give night classes at the local community college a shot.

She’s explored expounding on her newfound love for mechanics, and enrolled in the school’s auto class, which rapidly became her favorite period of the day. Any friends that were bemused by her swerve into something seemingly out of character were hit by a well-prepared rant about the evolution of femininity, though she’d still privately rankle at the attention and it has become a personal sore spot that preys on her insecurities over being judged.

One development caught her in particular. She’d never been too fond of her fellow female peers as she found most of them save a select few too vapid and she broadly considered the modern woman too materialistic and shallow even if she treated most of them well to their face. However those few girls who she allowed herself to let her guard down around even a bit flustered and flummoxed her, and she at this year finally had the self-awareness and maturity to realize she was attracted to those very girls. Her awakening to her sexuality was focused onto two particular girl crushes both in photography club: Erika Stieglitz and Violet Quinn.

She was unsure of how to proceed, having never been conditioned by her literary tastes to have too much mental space for queer representation and models. She explored LGBT fiction only reluctantly, as it was one oddity too many for her neatly cultivated self-image to take with ease, her open-mindedness of her youth had dried up as she’d become more self-assured in her artistry and identity and she couldn’t fathom where to begin in such a broad new way of understanding herself. She was also acutely aware that her attraction to both Erika and Violet was skin-deep, by her standards, and she desperately wished to pick them apart and validate her desires with depth and passion but was also afraid of becoming too intimate with either and breaking that distance she carefully curated with all her peers to date.

The final disruption of Princesses’ senior year was her mother turning to the MLM Herbalife to make a quick buck- Princess recognized that they’d only be losing money on such a scheme. Princess tried to argue but both stubborn women held their ground, and Jacelyn turned to her current boyfriend for emotional support, freezing out Princess once more in the latest of their passive-aggressive spats. Princess continues to determine that she held her mother in lower esteem by the year, and developed an increasingly acute interest for leaving the trailer park she hated and blamed for her lot in life for good. She dreams of one day owning a nice car and travelling the states, visiting national parks and finding satisfaction in the career trappings of an author or mechanic and inventor.

Princess presently juggles her many obligations well, and recently worked up the nerve to take stab in the dark with Violet, electing to ask her to be girlfriend and girlfriend. She plans to transition into full time waitressing after graduating, and hopes to start acting in a local community theater before fall semester begins in her planned community college. She searches for scholarship opportunities to that effect. She will also be glad to be rid of the many high school friends she considers only passably amusing at best- but already also plans at the exact same time to forge her social network in her adult life with gusto.

Advantages: Princess is a seasoned actress with a conscious ability to be aware of and modulate how she projects herself thus affording her potential advantages and versatility in social manipulation. She was already fairly well-known and liked while many of her more negative traits were well-hidden, so she may have social leverage initially in alliances.

Disadvantages: Princess is unconsciously inclined to being reclusive and distrustful, which may complicate social situations due to naturally misanthropic bias. She is stubborn and has difficulty adjusting her mentality and opinions on the fly, which may complicate long term survival in terms of her abilities to adapt. Her insecurities and pride may also cause her to reflexively project false strength or otherwise retreat at inopportune times, creating conflict or otherwise shorting potential opportunities.

Designated Number: Female student No. 060

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Designated Weapon: Vial of Samandarin + vial of antidote

Conclusion: Adapt and overcome, G060. You're versatile and with a good skill set. Manipulate your way into a strong social circle of 'friends' willing to take a bullet for you, obtain a weapon of your own, and you might just stand atop the mountain. Doesn't that sound promising? - Tracen Danya

'The above biography is as written by Cicada Days. No edits or alterations to the author's original work have been made.'

Evaluations
Handled by: Cicada Days

Kills: 

Killed By: 

Collected Weapons: Vial of Samandarin + vial of antidote (assigned weapon)

Allies: Claudeson Bademosi, Valerija Bogdanovic, Camille Bellegarde, Jessica Rennes, Thomas Buckley, Sean Leibowitz

Enemies: 

Mid-game Evaluation: 

Post-Game Evaluation: 

Memorable Quotes:

Threads
Below is a list of threads containing Princess, in chronological order.

The Past: V7 Pregame: Prom: The Trip: V7:
 * The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms
 * Collisions
 * A poet could not but be gay.
 * One shade the more, one ray the less.
 * Four Score and Seven Furbies Ago
 * I’m a Princess, Cut From Marble, Smoother Than a Storm
 * Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
 * Deep Red Bells
 * A modest violet grew,
 * Right Turn at Albuquerque
 * Lately Kiss My Ass Lately
 * Quinnspiracy Theory

Your Thoughts
''Whether you were a fellow handler in SOTF or just an avid reader of the site, we'd like to know what you thought about Princess McQuillan. What did you like, or dislike, about the character? Let us know here!''